Wan Hai Lines Brand Guidelines: A 1965 Taipei Timber Carrier Turned Asian Box Line

A timber carrier that switched to containers in 1976.

Wan Hai Lines was founded in Taipei on 24 February 1965. The Taiwanese business news site ETtoday, in a report on the company’s 60th anniversary published on 24 February 2025, names its founders as Chen Yung (陳勇) and Lin Po-shou (林柏壽), together with other partners. The company’s Chinese name is 萬海航運, and in English it trades as Wan Hai Lines Ltd.

Its first trade was not containers but timber. According to ETtoday, the young company carried logs between Taiwan, Japan and Southeast Asia. In July 1976, as international shipping moved towards containers, it bought a fully containerised ship and opened a container service between Taiwan and Japan, which ETtoday describes as the milestone that began Wan Hai’s container business. English Wikipedia places the same shift in 1976 and links it to the growth of trade across the Asia-Pacific region.

The company went to the stock market two decades later. Wan Hai listed its shares on the Taiwan Stock Exchange in May 1996, ETtoday reports; Chinese Wikipedia gives the listing date as 16 May 1996 and the stock code as 2615. Chinese Wikipedia also groups Wan Hai with Evergreen Marine and Yang Ming as the three large Taiwanese container carriers.

Leadership has passed through the Chen family. ETtoday reports that in June 2008 three second-generation brothers stepped down from the board, and Chen Po-ting (陳柏廷) took over the chair, making him the third generation to lead the company. He addressed the company’s 60th-anniversary dinner at the Grand Hotel in Taipei on 24 February 2025, the same report says.

An Asian network, then longer routes.

For most of its history Wan Hai has been an intra-Asia carrier. ETtoday says that until 2020 the company ran mainly Southeast Asian routes and therefore operated a fleet of small and mid-sized ships. During the container shipping boom of 2020 it sped up its building programme, and in 2021 it ordered neo-Panamax ships of about 13,100 TEU, intended for routes to North America, the Middle East and South America.

The scale of that programme is set out in the anniversary report. Chen Po-ting told guests that between 2018 and 2024 the company had bought or ordered 118 ships, of which 85 had been delivered by the end of 2024. As of February 2025, ETtoday counted 112 container ships in service, 110 of them owned and two chartered, running on 68 routes and calling directly at 84 ports. The company has dedicated terminals at Keelung, Taichung and Kaohsiung, the report adds.

The large ships came from South Korea. A company release published by Hellenic Shipping News on 20 July 2023 describes the naming of WAN HAI A11 and WAN HAI A12 at Samsung Heavy Industries’ Geoje shipyard on 19 July 2023. Wan Hai had signed for thirteen ships of 13,100 TEU with that yard since 2021, the release says; each is 335 metres long, and A11 was to be deployed on East-West trades. Chinese Wikipedia notes that Wan Hai names its ships with the company name and a number, and that the newer large ships take the letter A before a two-digit number.

Asia remains the core of the network. Maritime Gateway reported on 30 October 2026 that Wan Hai planned to start a new loop, CI8 (China India Service 8), in late November 2026, linking Haiphong and the South China ports of Qinzhou, Nansha and Shekou with Mundra and Nhava Sheva in western India via Port Klang, using ships of 2,800 to 3,000 TEU on a 35-day round trip. The report noted that sailings had not yet begun.

One serious incident is on record. On 9 June 2025 the container ship WAN HAI 503 caught fire while sailing off India’s west coast, and the crew followed abandon-ship procedures under international maritime rules, Taiwan’s Central News Agency reported that day, citing a company filing; the cause was still to be established.

Design and documentation.

Container lines, box lessors and port operators sell capacity rather than consumer products, and they present themselves mostly to shippers, carriers, investors and job seekers. Their identities travel on large objects. A line’s colours and name are repeated on hulls, on the containers it owns and on terminal equipment. Corporate photography tends to show ships at sea, stacked containers and cranes over quays, often lit at night.

Websites carry much of the practical work. Carriers publish schedules, route maps and booking or tracking tools; lessors such as Triton run sales portals, product sheets and pages on container conditions; terminal operators list their ports, berths and services. Fleet pages and dated timelines matter a great deal: Seaspan’s site, for example, sets out its history as a year-by-year list of ship deliveries, designs and orders.

Fuel and emissions now have pages of their own. Shipowners and lines describe dual-fuel ships, retrofits and new fuels such as LNG and methanol, usually in their own words and with their own figures, alongside sustainability reports and the certificates and policies they choose to publish. Those pages are statements by the companies, and this guide reports them as such.

Ownership changes often. Many companies in this group were formed by merger, are owned by infrastructure or private-equity investors, or are partly held by the carriers they serve, and their annual reports, preference shares and investor pages remain public even after a take-private. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — when it was founded, who owns it and how it describes its business — and marks clearly what rests only on its own word.

We carry, we care.

Wan Hai’s public voice is short and plain. Its English motto is “We carry, we care,” which the company tied in its July 2023 release to a donation of necessities to a local charity in Geoje, describing the motto as part of its commitment to service and corporate social responsibility. The Chinese name 萬海 joins the characters for “ten thousand” and “sea.”

The company marked 60 years on 24 February 2025 with a low-key dinner in Taipei, ETtoday reported, at which the chairman described the 60-year journey as one of meeting people rather than of travelling the world. Hutchison Ports’ managing director was the only guest speaker, according to the same report; compare Hutchison Ports for that port group’s own story.

No colour or typeface rules for the company’s mark are published in the sources used here, so the palette in this guide is ours.

For a design guide, Wan Hai Lines shows how a family-run carrier can build a recognisable fleet through steady habits — numbered hulls, a four-word motto and an Asian network first. Compare Evergreen Marine and Yang Ming, its two larger Taiwanese peers. For this guide we use navy, a strait blue and a timber sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Wan Hai Lines’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.